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Chinese Claim Internet Censorship Modeled on West
ubermiester wrote to mention a NYT article reporting on a Chinese Press Briefing. At the event Liu Zhengrong, supervisor of Internet affairs for the Chinese State Council, stated that the state control of Internet access is based on Western models. From the article: "Mr. Liu said the major thrust of the Chinese effort to regulate content on the Web was aimed at preventing the spread of pornography or other content harmful to teenagers and children. He said that its concerns in this area differ minimally from those in developed countries. Human rights and media watchdog groups maintain that Chinese Web censorship puts greater emphasis on helping the ruling party maintain political control over its increasingly restive society. Such groups have demonstrated that many hundreds of Web sites cannot be easily accessed inside mainland China mainly because they are operated by governments, religious groups or political organizations that are critical of Chinese government policies or its political leaders."
article: "If you study the main international practices in this regard you will find that China is basically in compliance with the international norm," he [the official] said. "The main purposes and methods of implementing our laws are basically the same."
purpose: to censor "harmful" parts of the Internet, no definition of "harmful"
method: firewalls and Internet minders, not necessarily censorship itself
Seems like you could come up a pretty nice comparision between the Chinese government and AOL blocking porn sites with a kid filter under such broad terms of discussion.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
FTA: Mr. Liu said that Chinese Internet users have free rein to discuss many politically sensitive topics and rejected charges that the police have arrested or prosecuted people for using the Internet to circulate views.
He... is... nuts.
"Major U.S. companies do this and it is regarded as normal," Mr. Liu said. "So why should China not be entitled to do so?"
But he has a point here.
Our congressman are editing their own bios in wikipedia...
Bush is requesting personal data from Google and the likes...
And quite some people are getting fired for blogging...
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
Atheist, communist China does not want pr0n on the Internet. Religious wingnuts don't want pr0n on the Internet. Why those two who are at extremely opposed political positions don't want pr0n on the Internet???
The only real 'speech' laws that the US has that it activly tries to enforce over the Internet are child porn laws. Those are enforced because compelling a minor to strip naked and fuck a dog or whatever is illegal. China and the West are night and day when it comes to Internet content. The West makes almost no attempt to regulate the content that goes up. The US is actually the most extreme case that does the absolutely least regulation. If you want to throw up a Nazi hate site, that is a-okay in the US.
e ws/2006/01/16/wchina16.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/01/16 /ixworld.html
China is full of shit if they think there is any parallel between what the US does and what they do in terms of Internet censorship.
China's problem is that at some point they are going to have to turn around and face their internal problems in a constructive non-authoritarian manner. The US can have neo-Nazi websites because it has a stable political system that, while certainly not perfect, does a good job at keeping the masses content enough that rebellion doesn't linger on anyone's mind. China on the other hand has a political system where the masses have little say in governance. China has left the only opposition to government policies to be rebellion. As a result, China deals with constant (and little reported on) riots and instances of civil unrest that are completely alien to most Western governments.
A day of reckoning is coming for China, and their tardiness in opening up their government to oversight by the general populace is going to make this reckoning all the worse. China needs to take some more serious steps towards instituting good civil governance.
Don't believe that China has a serious problem with their ability to govern? Consider this fact. Official figures admit 74,000 individual incidents of unrest in 2004.*
*Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
Something like this: "Yahoo is committed to obey local laws, ONLY if they don't go against international treaties and human rights."
... poses significant problems" in the text. Which is rather odd for a country that spends so much time spouting off about how much it loves human rights, and spends so much time passing pointless laws on the basis that they'll supposedly make children safer. (Like COPPA, which "protects" children by forcing them to lie about their age.)
But Yahoo is based in a country that does not particularly respect international treaties on human rights; for example, you're doubtless well aware that the USA is one of only two states that has not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
According to the Bush administration, the reason for this is that "the human rights-based approach
Senior Party Leaders Join Battle Against Chinese Censorship.
This idea that the Chinese government is entirely pro-censorship is a bit untrue. There are those within China---even some who are high up the political food chain---who see this as a bad idea.
I wonder how it'll all turn out?
-Tom
Hey, I just saw some deskmonkey on CNBC's business news cooing over the DuPont CEO, who praised Bush's "prioritization of science and math education in his State of the Union speech". The DuNapalmPont CEO's favorite example of "public private partnership for improving education"? His recent meeting in Shanghai with Communist Party Vice Mayor for R&D, running their own government labs. Meanwhile, Bush just cut education funding, while funding any number of religious and political operations.
Fascism is the merger of business and government power, by putting a government face on the corporate body. Communism is the same merger, by ownership of property and operation of business by government. Both are run on propaganda and censorship, usually promoted as education.
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make install -not war
In other words, it's okay for China to block freedom and democracy because the "West" blocks child pornography? Pardon me if I don't see the moral equivalence.
A better comparison would be France and Germany blocking certain Nazi related information. It is a better comparison because the "West" (as a whole) condemns it as well.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The technology is such that there will be thousands, if not millions, of workarounds to penetrate any barriers to access. Just look at the history so far of electronic transmission.
I don't think anyone here is giving credit to the intelligence of people. They are parroting the standard line that evil is all powerful and cannot be overcome.
Get real! The nerds will create gaping holes in the barriers, and as the government moves to plug them up, the nerds will create more. The game will continue indefinitely.
But my money is on the hackers to always be one step ahead. The information will flow regardless of government controls.
Bill
You can add to that most sabotage and bomb making material being illegal in the UK and Germany to the point where it is impossible to write a truthfull article about the WWII resistance methods and post it on the web.
If put on my website a description of any of the devices used for train derailment by the Russian partisans or the French resistance my hosting company will get smacked by a takedown notice right away. And it will comply.
Same for a description of any of the biological weapons delivery systems pioneered by the Japanese in WWII (as they can be made in a basement), same for the methods used by Germans to distribute cholera in the civilian population on the Eastern front in 1917, so on so fourth.
It is scary when history becomes illegal.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
If you haven't looked it up, New Orleans had an evacuation plan. It's available on the 'net. The buses that were supposed to be manned by city workers were left in their parking lots and flooded out. The pictures of that are on the 'net too. New Orleans has known since Hurricane Betsy in 1965 that they needed to have an evacuation plan ready. They couldn't get their act together in 40 years.
Now corrupt government officials who don't do their job are no stranger in the PRC. several million evacuated and zero casualties? I call BS. This is the same government system that tried to cover up SARS, probably has been covering up bird flu, and most certainly covers up day-in day-out disasters over a number of things from environmental spills to mining disasters.
The PRC is not a normal country. It's not just a little behind the curve. It's a country coming out of a truly evil system and it's not quite sure whether it wants to quit that evil or not.
"Mr. Liu said the major thrust of the Chinese effort to regulate content on the Web was aimed at preventing the spread of pornography or other content harmful to teenagers and children.
fine, sites like this: http://et.21cn.com/portray/ , this: http://tu.tom.com/list/beauty.html , this: http://www.qihoo.com/site/tietu/index.html ... are totally accessible China sites for Chinese teenagers and children of any age... (yep, they're NOT pornography and harmful content, maybe I'm just too sensitive...)
dear poor blocked http://www.freebsd.org/ you're more harmful to teenagers and children in China...
twitter.com/xuyihua